‘Trick ‘r Treat’s Sam Is A New Halloween Digital Decoration!

In what has to be the coolest Halloween merchandise announcement of 2016, details have emerged today of a new hologram-style digital decoration that will feature the beloved Sam from writer/director Michael Dougherty’s cult classic anthology Trick ‘r Treat, starring in new scenes filmed just for this unique release!

Last month, Dougherty posted a photo on Twitter of Sam being filmed for something, and while many hoped it was the much anticipated sequel (it wasn’t, but it’s coming), it turns out that what was being filmed was actually a series of all new vignettes in which Sam kills people who break the rules of Halloween in your house with this awesome new projection system from AtmosFX.

As reported by Bloody-Disgusting, the new vignettes have Sam enforcing his rules of Halloween by responding to the neighborhood bully who attempts to trick-or-treat without an adequate costume, exacting revenge at a residence where healthy snacks are given away for Halloween, turning the tables on an old curmudgeon who steals candy from neighborhood kids, re-decorating the home of a homeowner who removes his Halloween decorations before the night is complete, and conducting a mesmerizing symphony of fire from a cauldron of unwanted sweets.

Dougherty tells Entertainment Weekly, “Every year, I decorate my yard, and I like to go all out, and I like to spice it up a little bit more each year. I was trying to replicate the effect that you see at the Haunted Mansion at Disneyland. It’s an old theater effect called Pepper’s Ghost that creates the illusion of what looks like a holographic ghost. I figured that there must be some sort of modern way of doing this, using projector technology, and so I got together with some friends, and I made some ghosts of my own, and projected them into windows.

“But I wanted something new, and so I looked online to see if anybody else was making these modern-day Pepper’s Ghost effects, and I found this company which had a whole line of these amazing effects you could project into windows, and doorways, and create holographic ghosts. I bought some, and I was using them, and then, when I finally clicked on the ‘About’ section of the website, only then did I realize that the company was founded by two old friends of mine from back when I was an animator in New York. It was just one of those weird coincidences. I reached out to them, and we reconnected, and started brainstorming. I said, ‘Why don’t we get together and do some of our own decorations and maybe we can ask Legendary [Entertainment] if we can use the Sam character from Trick ‘r Treat?’ It all took off from there.”

Dougherty worked closely with AtmosFX to bring Sam back to life inside these new digital vignettes.

“Each one is like a little short film, where you get to watch Sam murder somebody in your house,” adds the director. “It’s him murdering people on Halloween — as a decoration!”

“You can display a digital decoration on your front window and entertain trick-or-treaters, or your neighbors. You could use your TV set as a prop and turn it into a scary animated portrait,” says AtmosFX co-founder Peter Reichert of the high-end animation visual effect. “The gist of it is to bring that wild experience that you might have at Disney’s Haunted Mansion and allow the everyday decorator to do it.”

On the subject of Trick ‘r Treat 2, Dougherty tells EW, “The sequel to Trick ‘r Treat is definitely one (project) that I’m working on, as well as few other things, that I can’t really talk about yet. But they all involve monsters!”

The Sam digital decoration will be available as a high-definition digital download starting at the end of September, exclusively at AtmosFX.com.

You can watch a behind the scenes video of the creation of the new Trick ‘r Treat digital decoration in the player below!